Have you ever asked yourself, “When will I ever use this bleepity-bleep class material in my life?!” It’s vexatious to think that so much time and energy is being spent on something so … irrelevant, right? Well, there is at least one teacher out there who agrees and sympathizes with this frustration. Ryan Devlin, an English teacher at Brockway Area High School, and recently appointed 2013 Teacher of the Year for Pennsylvania, has taken on a new teaching perspective and is encouraging others to do the same.
Devlin graduated from Waynesburg University a few years ago and went back for a master’s degree from California University of Pennsylvania. He is still in his twenties and has youth on his side. He incorporates technology and pop culture into his lesson plans in order to relate to the interests of his students.
During his Feb. 14 visit to Nicarry Hall at Elizabethtown College, Devlin pulled out his iPad to share Slideklowd, a new technology that allows students to actively engage in presentations. He had all of the students sign in to his presentation on their smart phones or laptops, and then class began.
Devlin spoke of his disappointment with the current system, raising the question: “How come the world has changed so much, but the quality of education hasn’t?” He pointed out that the public education system of the United States is currently ranked twenty-fifth among the systems of other nations. “We have the greatest of so many things, but we really can’t boast or brag about our education system,” he said.
Devlin then had the students vote through their smart phones and laptops based on whether they found textbooks exciting. No one did. Devlin believes strongly that with over one million students dropping out of school each year, something needs to be done to make school more interesting and more relatable to students.
Schools are still teaching the same old things: math, science, history, literature, technology and languages. Some of these things will be useful forever, certainly; but there are other skills that also need emphasis. Devlin referenced Tony Wagner’s “Global Achievement Gap;” he pointed out the seven skills Wagner feels are most important to our students today. Math was not one of them. Critical thinking, curiosity and imagination, entrepreneurship, communication skills, analyzing, collaboration and leadership all made the list.
According to Devlin, “Students need to learn by doing things, not by sitting and talking about them in a classroom.” In an economics class at Brockway, for example, students are required to launch their own businesses at the end of the semester. Devlin considered this an amazingly beneficial assignment and said, “They end up seeing, oh, we made an error in our pricing or that they didn’t have a good product after all – these are things they learned by practicing the material in a real world context.”
Devlin’s passion for integrating technology and actively engaging students in their learning within the classroom both undoubtedly contributed to his distinction as 2013 Teacher of the Year.